studentized

1. With our season starting out on the wrong foot, how do you keep your morale high? It's all about how we finish. Goal is to try to figure some things out for the future and build some momentum. 2. We have been in some real hard fought games. How do you feel your about your player and his/her compete level? Just not good enough overall. Too invisible too often. Some positive games I can use though, just need that consistency. 3. With Thanksgiving coming up fast, will you make time to stay in shape or pig out? Been there done that with this whole thanksgiving thing this year. Will still eat like a pig though. 4. We have some young players really doing well under the circumstances, who sticks out in your mind? Gotta love our goalies. A Red Guy projecting out to be a top one 5. What changes would you like to see on our team, be it players or playtime? Whatever it takes to win. We've played lots of close games we just need to close them out. Personally working on getting stronger and faster. 6. What do you like most about our team so far? We're trying things. Trying to figure it out. The effort is there just none of the payoff yet.

It's been a longer term goal of mine to figure out what makes a line perform well. This is a pretty broad topic and one that I will probably have to do many write ups on to get a satisfactory answer, but to start I have to understand how lines are used in the VHL. Most teams have 2 lines worth of non-bot players. A few teams run with 3 lines like New York (who now are back to running 2 lines the past couple of games). Despite this, the STHS sim runs with 4 "normal" lineups and 2 lineups of each special teams type. This means some players will inevitably play on many lines and the VHL compensates for this by giving every player a 99 endurance rating. Or so I thought. In my scrounging through STHS docs trying to figure out what all the little bells and whistles do in the sim, the first thing I needed to do was to understand the different versions of the simulation engine. There are four versions: 1.1, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.1. The gist of it is that 1.1 came first and is the O.G sim. 2.0 came next with a whole bunch of new features but the output was so random and gross that no one could use it. Then came 1.5 which took a few of the nice 2.0 features and added them to the 1.1 engine. 2.1 is essentially a bug fixed 2.0. As you can read here (and confirm here), one of the things added to 1.5 that is NOT present in 1.1 is the ability to control line strategies/time on ice. This is a feature that GM’s appear to be able to control and configure already due to the STHS client we use (check out our index) BUT in fact does not even impact the sim because we sim on the 1.1 engine (thank you to devise for confirming). If you continue reading that STHS forum post, some player stat categories from the 2.0 engine were added to 1.5 but not to 1.1, most notably EN (but also PS, which confirms the generally accepted idea around the forums that PS was a useless stat). All this being said, I’m not trying to say that it’s a bad thing to use the 1.1 engine. What it does mean is that we are at the mercy of STHS when it comes to how often each line gets used and when players become fatigued. This begged the question: how are lines actually used in the VHL? The chart above shows the amount of "shifts" for each line across all teams in S69 so far (as of game 155). Here I've counted a "shift" as a line change parsed from the full play by play of the game logs where some event occurred in between. For example something like: Normal Lineup #1 is on the ice for home team. Normal Lineup #1 is on the ice for away team. Player A shoots the puck. ... Normal Lineup #4 is on the ice for home team. Player B shoots the puck. Normal Lineup #2 is on the ice for away team. ... would be counted as one shift for home line #1 vs away line #1, one shift for home line #4 vs away line #1, and one shift for home line #4 vs away line #2. In particular, there is no time component being measured here (the first shift is almost certainly longer than the second shift in my example) which is a limitation, but my hope was that this type of thing would even-out in the long run. As for the chart, the biggest thing that stands out is the higher amount of shifts for normal line 3 vs normal line 2. At first I thought there were bugs in my code, then I thought that this was one of those discrepancies between shifts and time played, but then I looked at SHTS which tracks minutes played for each player and separates out speciality teams minutes played (PP + PK). from even strength minutes. So I went to look for differences in even strength TOI between 3rd line players AND 2nd line players. This was not as easy as it sounds because almost every team has mixed their lines a bunch to this point. Fortunately for me, Toronto hasn’t. Legion LW Koda Adok has played all 26 games on the 3rd line and racked up 293 even strength minutes. Legion RW Matthew Kai has played all 26 games on the 2nd line and racked up 298 EV minutes. This might seem a bit cherry picked and anecdotal I guess, but the general pattern is pervasive; 3rd line players play pretty much the same amount of minutes as 2nd line players. So the third line matters. I’d even go as far to say as it matters as much as the second line. Traditionally in hockey, this isn’t that unusual. But given the VHL’s limited amount of skilled players to put on lines I ask myself: “is it better to re-use your top guys on the third line or to play different, less skilled guys?”. I won’t attempt to answer that in this media spot because I don’t think I have the supporting data to answer it just yet. But it is something to keep in mind and would be curious if anyone else has any thoughts on the matter. Ok, we now have a better idea about which lines are used and how often they are used on aggregate. What about their matchups? If you were trying to build the perfect “first line”, would you only have to worry about beating the other teams first line? Or would you have to account for matchups all over. The answer is that all lines eventually will play against all opposing lines, but some are much more frequent than others. Take a look at the charts below, the first showing even strength matchups and the second special teams matchups. Some quick observations from these: 2nd lines do not regularly match up against other 2nd lines. I have no idea why this is, and perhaps most of these “off-line” matchups are short-shift ones but it still shows that a team will get many chances against your second line with their 1st and 3rd lines in a game, and it’s something worth accounting when building these lines. Even more interesting is how the third lines are used; just under two thirds of the time they are facing a higher line. If you're not going to stack the third line with your top guys, you better make sure they can at least defend well against them. Looking at special teams matchups, the matchup differences become more subtle. Each #1 line plays a pretty fair share of time against the opposing #1 or #2 lines. One little insight I gained from this is that your 4v4 lines become your 4 on 3 power play lines when that situation arises (~7% of the time they play). Not sure if that warrants trying to make those lines a little more offensive or not. I’ve well surpassed 1000 words now. Time to stop writing. will claim for 12/1 and 12/8

175 Seattle Bears @ Helsinki Titans 176 Prague Phantoms @ HC Davos Dynamo 177 Calgary Wranglers @ Moscow Menace 178 Riga Reign @ Vancouver Wolves

The second year winger out of New York has a much bigger role this year than last, but it doesn’t seem to be helping New York. The team endured a depressing 9 game losing streak early this season where Nolan didn’t do much on the scoresheet. “I came in with two main goals this year: fight more and score more. I haven’t really done either'' Nolan said. While his pace of play is better this year than last, projecting to score 33 points and 22 goals by the end of season after racking up just 16 points and 10 goals in S68, he has only scored points in 5 out of his team’s 20 games. “I feel like I’m either on my game or completely invisible. It’s pretty disappointing". Still there is a little room for hope for New York. Scoring should increase as they remain they worst team in the VHL in shooting percentage. “I think we have a better feel for who works best with who at this point” he went on to say. “As much as it pains me to admit it, I’m still at a point in my career where I need to be sheltered away from the tougher opponents a bit”. All but 2 points of Nolan’s have been scored when he was on the second line.

Seattle 4-1

139 Helsinki Titans @ HC Davos Dynamo 140 Moscow Menace @ Vancouver Wolves 141 Calgary Wranglers @ Prague Phantoms 142 Seattle Bears @ Toronto Legion

Claiming final doubles week 11/24

I usually do things like this as a media spot, but I really don't feel like writing 500 words along with it. Hope this is good 'nuff as a graphic (Edit: it doesn't look like it will get approved. It's a media spot now) To measure "good", I used Corsi For Percentage (CF%) and to measure "lucky" I used PDO. When calculating both of these stats, all strengths were used (not just 5v5). This is not really the way they're normally presented (and not the way I wanted) but you can only do so much with sim league stats sometimes. RIP New York Ok so this doesn't look like it's going to be accepted as a graphic, so I'm going to write some more words and claim as a media spot instead. Things we can read off of this chart: 1) The season should get better for New York. Possession numbers are average but they are by far the worst team at translating possession into more goals for/fewer goals against. They should bounce back some, but its going to be hard to overcome the hole they're in. 2) Davos sucks. They suck so bad that the scale on the chart is so extreme that it really fails to emphasize how good Vancouver and Moscow are visually. Looking at NHL stats last year, a 53% CF% or higher would place you top 5 in the league. Vancouver and Moscow are both in that range. I'm not sure if there has ever been a possession team as bad as Davos, but it is still early and things can change (but hopefully not so we can see this tire fire continue) 3) Expansion teams are competitive. Yes DC is getting some luck and may fall off a bit, but they are holding their own for the most part. Prague is actually doing well in terms of possession (in part due to playing Davos a bunch) but is on the end of some minor bad luck. I still maintain that neither expansion team will make the playoffs this year, but it seems like significant progress was made vs S68. 4) Malmo is hurting without Thompson. Many pinged the signing of Jake Davis to mitigate the loss by a lot and for Malmo to have another season atop the EU. I didn't follow their off season too much outside of this, so there might be another explanation, but it looks like Thompson was the difference between average and finals bound, at least it looks that way now, at this early part of the season. Next steps: I really want to look at even strength numbers vs all strengths. I don't think this will be too hard, but it requires parsing what lineup is on the ice (power play, penalty kill, normal, etc.) with every shot attempt/goal scored. A bonus to this is it means I can get Corsi and PDO at the player level, something I've wanted to do for a while. Spent a good hunk of time making it so this kind of thing should be easy to generate in the future, so I will probably keep posting them occasionally (for no TPE) at other points throughout the season.

G - Finn Davison D - Guy Legrande @Velevra

1. How are you celebrating the start to the regular season? Celebrated a little too hard last night. No more for me. 2. New York is sitting 2nd in NA and 5th Overall to start the season, how do we feel going forward? Too early for standings to matter, but we've played well. Feeling good about our game, just need to keep it up. 3. True rookie Soren Jensen has had an exceptional start to his career with 4pts in 6 games. How does this youth production impact our program? Adds a top line forward to our future. That's a good thing. 4. Expansion teams DC and Prauge claim to have their footing under them, coming out undefeated opening night and remaining as middle of the pack teams, do you expect any breakout seasons for their programs? Not really. They will still be last in their conferences imo. 5. We recently upset the cup favorite Moscow Menace, how do we feel coming out of that game? I think everyone had fun. It's fun to win against anybody, cup favourite or not. 6. Who’s the loudest personality on the NY bench? Steve is the chattiest for sure. I don't know about "loudest personality" though.

f - jet jaguar F - kronos Bailey @Velevra Sorry if typos

@DilIsPickle frostbite and zeno DQ'd. I think you make their picks from here on out? Or does that just happen at end of draft?

Seattle 5-4

49 Prague Phantoms @ Moscow Menace 50 Calgary Wranglers @ Vancouver Wolves 51 Seattle Bears @ Helsinki Titans 52 HC Davos Dynamo @ Malmo Nighthawks

D - Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen F - Mikko Aaltonen back to you @Velevra

claiming free week 11/17

1. Really well. Draft fell off a bit after the top 3 guys, and we managed to grab one of them at number 4. 2. I'm a big fan of the plan Esso has laid out. Would rather not make impulse signings of it doesn't fit in with that plan, and that's what it looks like we did. 3. Seattle vs Malmo round two would be lame, but looking likely. I'm big on Moscow for EU though and my underdog from NA would be Calgary. 4. Just wrote a bit about it in my VHL.com article, but Moscow had another really smart off season 5. Jensen falling to us at number 4. Okada falling to number 9 6. Steve league MVP? Nolan MIP? Calgary somehow winning cup on the back of brick wahl?

Just some assorted thoughts about the off-season for this one. Moscow is going to have a good year and are my favourites to win the EU conference. Despite missing the playoffs last season, Moscow had the third best team TPA growth of all non-expansion teams (all while leading the league in overall TPA). This off season, even with the loss of Cast, the introduction of Smitty and Gritty will get them to the top. Victor does all of the little things right in back to back years IMO Calgary also had a solid off season. They will still be around to battle for the last playoff spot this year in a weak NA conference and the future became a little brighter. After what looked like a strong S68 draft turned out to be a bit underwhelming, the S69 draft gives them a chance to right the ship. They had three first round picks and got arguably the best value in the draft (Okada at 9). New York is set up well for the future. Esso has been patient building this team and I don't see any holes in this roster in a few seasons, barring some unforeseen inactivity/free agent departures. Making the playoffs this season would go a long way to show off some of that progress and attract some big name FAs for an S70 push.

Yea

The soon to be sophomore winger of the New York Americans is hoping to change his game significantly this off-season. Nolan scored 10 goals, and picked up a measly 6 assists playing predominantly third line minutes for the Americans last year. Fortunately for New York fans, he followed up on his poor VHL season with a much stronger WJC performance; one that should give hope for the future. Here's what Nolan needs to work on to make more of an impact next year: DEFENCE The bottom line here is that Nolan needs to care more. He didn't play a top 6 role last year because he spends too little time working on his defensive positioning. Fellow rookie Mica Sage proves this point. Sage (recently retired) was generally considered as the less skilled forward, but his effort defensively made him the easy pick to play on the second line, ahead of Nolan. If Nolan wants to play more meaningful minutes, he’ll need to play better defence first. His minus 10 rating last year made him the worst among forwards on New York so this is easily the one area of his game where the biggest difference can be made. Question is: will it be enough to propel him to VHL stardom? STRENGTH Shooting the puck and finishing high percentage plays are still Nolan's strongest assets. He managed a 8.6% shooting percentage in S68 which will serve him well going forward if he can maintain that rate. The biggest problem he faced last year was maneuvering himself into those high danger areas often enough. He only managed to get 116 shots through, leaving another 42 shots to get blocked. From a turnover perspective, Nolan ranked the highest forward on his team with a 1.01 takeaway to giveaway ratio. Still, this was achieved mostly against weaker competition and it remains to be seen how well this phase of his game will translate to harder matchups. Getting a little bit stronger should help Nolan position himself better in the dirty areas to help him score more goals as well as limit some turnovers from being checked off the puck. ENFORCING While many people believe the enforcer role is dead and should stay dead in the VHL, this is mostly true only of pure enforcers. Players who can stand up for their teammates, get under the skin of the opposing team, all while still doing more important things at a high level, can serve their team in an important way. New York is one of those teams that could really use someone here; they only got into 11 fights last year, one of the lowest totals in the league. Nolan makes the most sense to fill this void given his size and play style. Look for him to become one of these players that teams dread to play against. It’s a huge off-season for Nolan. This next season should set the path for what type of career he will have the rest of the way. For the sake of New York, let’s hope it’s a good one. 512 words

1. With the removal of "GM player" being a thing (at least I think its no longer a thing) , I would like to see us draft George Washington. Played with him in Halifax and if he trains anything like Kastelic does, he's gonna be good. 2. Willinsky reunion? Not sure how open he would be to coming back but that guys a pro and someone I model my game after. 3. I can see us overcoming Toronto and Calgary. Gonna largely depend on the off season we all have, but my hope is for 2nd in the NA conference 4. Malmo losing Thompson right off the bat will hurt. Moscow with Past, etc. My vote would be for those two. 5. I expect them to kick ass. I set the bar pretty low so hopefully they can fare better than I did. 6. Seattle personally. We are the two up and comers in the NA. Looking forward to building that rivalry more.

The S68 playoffs of the VHL just wrapped up and Seattle won in four games over Malmo. Both of these teams failed to make the playoffs in S67, so it’s hard to believe that anyone would have predicted them both to make the finals at the beginning of the year (and to the best of my knowledge no one did predict both correctly). But take a closer look and you will see that neither of these teams were Cinderella stories. Both had good off-seasons, and more importantly good development during the regular season that allowed them to make the jump from sitting out of playoffs to being the last ones left in their conferences. Here is how they stacked up against the rest of the league in terms of TPA growth: The following graphs show end-of-season S67 team TPA vs end-of-season S68 team TPA (ordered by S68 TPA). Seattle and Malmo may not have led the league in terms of overall TPA, but the growth they got from S67 put them very close. Looking at this another way in terms of percentage growth (see second chart), it’s apparent that no other team had quite the same off-season/regular season as these two. Only three teams saw any amount positive percent growth (thanks expansion) and in terms of net gains, Seattle and Malmo were the only ones that were meaningful. Just really good GMing in a year where many teams were forced to take steps back. Congrats to both teams once again; both deserved to make it far.